I normally write about software that you can install on your computer. Today I've decided to write about an awesome site I stumbled upon, called Many Eyes.

Many Eyes is an online application created to assist in what the IBM creators call "social data analysis". It's a bit like Facebook meets DailyLit in some weird way; you can see visualizations from other users, and the content is pretty interesting; it can even be done on some great passages. One of my favorite visualization sets on Many Eyes is the analysis done on Shakespeare's work.

You can subscribe to RSS on newly added community visualizations, add your own, comment on them, etc. In addition, you can view data sets which are used to generate visualizations in order to generate your own type of visualizations. 

There are several types you can choose from: 

A list of the way they look can be found here.

As a walk through to the site, I will be using one of my previous articles on SoftCity to illustrate how the site works. Can you guess which article I used? :) 

After registering/logging in, you can create a visualization from existing data sets or create a new one. Let's create one that will accept free text (in this case, the article in question). 

Warning: Everything you upload can be visible by the IBM Many Eyes community!

The following is a Word Cloud of the article. 

Needless to say the first time I visited this site I was blown away by the sheer power and speed of the processing behind the scenes. I can't even begin to explain how any of this works (if you have any ideas please enlighten me!) but all I know is that sometimes - when I'm really lazy to read something - I can rely on this site to generate me an abstract. Feel free to do so with this article if you want to extract only the good stuff, and let me know how it turns out for you... :) 

One of the nice things about these visualizations is that you can load up special types of data and chose the right one. For example, if you want to know distribution of wealth in the US, click here and check out the visualization using a map. 

Although it's cool - I sometimes stumble across data sets that are difficult to understand, or just all out wrong. But for the ultimate laugh fest you can check out http://graphjam.com/

Although there doesn't seem to be a very strong connection between users of the community there is a way to create your own topic center and if you're lucky people might be so inclined to get data and add their visualizations to it :) 

Note: You will need to install the Java(TM) plug-in to load up the visualizations. I loaded this up with Google Chrome.

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